PEORIA — Teacher seniority rights in Illinois took another legal blow when a state appellate court upheld Peoria School District 150’s dismissal of two tenured teachers based on their unsatisfactory evaluations in 2012.

While attorneys for the district called the 3rd District Appellate Court’s opinion a victory for students, a state teachers’ union is considering its next steps, which could be to the Illinois Supreme Court.

In the opinion, issued Monday, two of three appellate justices affirmed a lower court finding that District 150 complied with state law in not rehiring Michelle Frakes and Eymarde Lawler over teachers with less experience following the district’s annual layoffs, known as reductions in force.

“This is a significant victory not only for Peoria’s school district but for all Illinois school districts,” Stanley Eisenhammer, an attorney for District 150’s board of education, said in a statement. “It means that when a school district is forced to lay off teachers due to financial conditions, it may retain its best and brightest teachers.”

Not surprisingly, the Illinois Federation of Teachers, which paid for the Chicago attorney who represented the two teachers, disagreed.

“We believe the court got it wrong in this case and we are currently exploring our legal options moving forward,” Aviva Bowen, spokeswoman for the IFT, said in a dueling statement.

Every student deserves high-quality teachers, but that’s not the issue, she said.

“This case is about whether school boards can play fast and loose with the law when hiring and firing teachers without due process,” Bowen said.

The teachers’ lawsuit challenged District 150’s implementation of provisions of Senate Bill 7, the wide-ranging education reform law that ended automatic recall rights for tenured teachers. State lawmakers recently enacted legislation that restores some of the recall rights teachers lost under SB 7 but provisions pertaining to this case remain, according to Eisenhammer.

Gil Feldman, attorney for the two teachers, has said a win for the school district could render teacher seniority rights meaningless.

Appellate Justices Robert Carter and Daniel Schmidt — like 10th Judicial Circuit Judge Michael Brandt before them — were not convinced. But Justice Vicki Wright was.

In her dissent, Wright argued the grounds for the two teachers’ dismissals, reductions in force, did not occur. The funding cuts District 150 initially anticipated did not occur and the district began the 2012-13 school year with as many or more teachers than in the previous school year, Wright said.

“In my view, without an actual reduction in the number of teachers, the statute does not allow the honorable discharge of any tenured teacher, including those with unsatisfactory evaluations.”

Frakes and Lawler, who both taught at Trewyn School, also have federal employment discrimination lawsuits pending.